On 06/23/2008 02:10 PM, Calvin Dodge wrote:
> On Mon, Jun 23, 2008 at 10:59 AM, Jan Ceuleers wrote:
>>> Mitch Gore wrote:
>>>>> Anyone ever used one of these?
>>>>> I've had two attempts at using Jetway boards. Both are J7F4 boards, one
>> is fanless, the other is fanfull :-)
>>> The consensus of comments I've seen over the years is that Jetway and
> PC Chips make crappy motherboards.
Agreed.
> Trust me - cheap hardware costs you
> more in the long run.
When I upgraded from my SDTV-only system to an HDTV-only system, I went
from a single combined frontend/backend running on a PC Chips mobo to 2
dedicated backends and one dedicated frontend. I kept the SDTV system
hardware for use as a slave backend, and decided to get a "good quality"
mobo for both the master backend and the frontend.
Unfortunately I chose (twice--ended up replacing the mobo 2 times) a
high-performance motherboard with a high-performance chipset--both very
good, well-respected brands, which I won't name, to protect the
guilty--for my master backend. Unfortunately, "high-performance" meant
a /ton/ of buggy features as opposed to a few properly-functioning
features. My master backend would crash every 2 weeks to 2 months. I
tried all sorts of software (kernel, etc.) tricks to make it stable.
Finally, I realized that the high performance mobo was adding no
required features and was only causing problems. I ended up buying
another (but different from my slave backend's) cheap PC Chips mobo with
a dirt-cheap low-performance chipset from another vendor and my system
is once again rock-solid stable. Now the buggy hardware is my dedicated
MythTV development server (where I don't care about stability/if it
crashes because I don't need to run it all the time).
In other words, IMHO, how much you pay is not directly related to
stability, nor is the vendor's marketing claims, nor even the "Tom's
Hardware" mobo review (as he doesn't test the kind of usage a MythTV box
receives) or whatever.
Note, I am /not/ recommending PC Chips mobo's. Anyone reading between
the lines will see that more than anything, old and stable (=high mobo
rev numbers, later chipset gens--late version hardware) is what I've
decided to use for stability. Another approach is to buy server-class
components, but I'm too cheap to do that.
Just my $0.02.
Mike